Alec Baldwin Kicked Off Flight for Playing Scrabble on His Phone

I’m a Scrabble player. I get it. Words With Friends is fun. An engrossing game is hard to put down. But sometimes, you need to put the game on hold. Like, when the flight attendant tells you to turn off your electronic devices.

Alec Baldwin didn’t want to do that, and was summarily thrown off the American Airlines flight prior to take-off. Reportedly, this was not because of his refusal to turn off his phone, but because afterwards he headed to the lavatory and slammed the door loudly. Which, admittedly, doesn’t seem like a terrific reason to throw someone off a flight. Baldwin, on the other hand, claims he got up to get the flight attendant’s name so he could file a complaint later. It’s a he said-she said situation, and it really doesn’t matter who was right. I don’t think anyone can be right in this situation. Bad looks all around.

It’s a situation that for many reasonable adults would be handled peaceably. Not so here. Baldwin completed the immaturity triple play by taking to Twitter, calling out American Airlines by tweeting,

Flight attendant on American reamed me out 4 playing WORDS W FRIENDS while we sat at the gate, not moving. #nowonderamericaairisbankrupt

I get that he was mad, but the bankruptcy dig seems low.

It seems like turning off your electronic devices prior to take-off while on the tarmac is pretty standard practice. After all, if I was the captain, I wouldn’t want my flight attendants scrambling around the cabin trying to make sure everyone’s complied with the rules while I’m preparing to hit the engines. But, I guess that wasn’t Baldwin’s line of thinking, which probably went more to the tune of, “What the hell did she just play? Is that even a word? She took my spot, too. I’m never playing with Tina again. This is Words with Friends. Wait, did that guy in the uniform say something? Probably wasn’t important.”

Or maybe Baldwin had a point. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I just hope for his sake that he ended up winning the game, to offset the indignity of getting tossed from a flight in front of the other passengers.

I’d love to have seen what happened. I know that I’ve been frustrated often enough when they make announcements saying that you need to turn off the devices, then they proceed to wait another 15 minutes before closing the door. Closing the door is supposed to be when you shut down your devices. I’m sure that he was sitting in first class, close to the door. With new devices, they generally go into standby mode as opposed to really turning off, so they also go to sleep and wake up almost instantly. It makes paying lip service to the average flight attendant quite easy.